


Leaf by Leaf

by Delphi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Books, F/M, First Time, Post-Battle, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-25 09:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Irma Pince sets out to recover a long-overdue book and ends up falling in love at a sensible pace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leaf by Leaf

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2012 round of Hoggwartyxmas on IJ.

Irma Pince did not believe in love at first sight.

In truth, there were a great many things that Irma didn't believe in, but her views on love were particular. They were at odds, after all, with her preferred genre of literature, which tended to feature passionate young couples who lost their senses to Cupid's bolts the moment they laid eyes upon each other. (Although, for the sake of padding out a novel to a healthy two or three hundred pages, said couples usually mistook said passion for hatred for the first third of the story.)

Fiction was fiction, and Irma was a practical woman in her late eighties who was not quite as inexperienced in life as many took spinsters to be. Moreover, she was a librarian, which meant that she knew better than most that you could not wholly judge a book by its cover.

So it was that, sensible and restrained as she was, it took Irma five full days to decide to fall in love with Aberforth Dumbledore.

~*~

Only a book could have brought her to the Hog's Head Inn, and perhaps only Ovid at that.

It was summertime, and slowly, the castle was being rebuilt. The dead had been buried, and as if it were truly possible to start afresh after such horrors, all had thrown themselves full-hearted into renovation. Hogwarts was a symbol, and symbols were more easily restored than lives.

The zeitgeist was, to Irma's annoyance, rather catching. She was not at all inclined towards the phenomenon of pulling together and pitching in, but the library had been in desperate need of a full re-cataloguing since before her own tenure at Hogwarts. There had simply never been the time for it, and in truth, there wasn't even time for it now if Minerva was serious about reopening the school on schedule in September. Yet she undertook the project nonetheless, because it was newly peacetime and one felt that one should take advantage.

So passed six weeks of weeding, ordering, mending, charming, de-hexing and reorganizing. Antiques were preserved and the antiquated sold off or reclassified. Her thread and beeswax and binding tape were soon exhausted. Then, in the aftermath, there had glared the accusatory gaps in the shelves, making Irma think unhappily of half-empty classrooms and silence in the corridors.

Grimly, she began writing letters.

She started with the most recent thefts. Argus, dear that he was, proved himself invaluable in ferreting out the hiding places of both students and staff and delivering any stolen books still on the premises. For the rest, she cross-referenced her list of the missing with a rather more terrible one and refrained from serving the dead with a strongly worded overdue notice.

In this fashion, she worked her way back nearly one hundred years, collecting battered hostages and grudgingly surrendered repayments. Until, finally, only one entry remained at the bottom of her ledger:

_Ovid, Metamorphoses, OV13 - signed out by Aberforth Dumbledore, November 28th, 1902._

~*~

Irma did not, as a rule, enjoy public houses. Even the Three Broomsticks was a little boisterous for her tastes, although she would admit that if one visited on a quiet Sunday, one could perhaps enjoy a spot of dinner and sip a gillywater whilst reading a good book without too much interruption.

The Hog's Head Inn did not seem conducive to reading, even standing empty as it did on the morning she breached its threshold. At that early hour, the place was deserted save for a tall man behind the bar engaged in tapping a keg. Irma looked about and reflected that she had not been missing much as she stepped inside to dim lamps and the smell of strong beer. The floor was slightly sticky beneath the soles of her boots.

The barman turned at the sound of her adhesive footsteps, and for an instant, something about his profile made Irma's heart drop. Then he faced her entirely, and she saw that he really didn't look much like his brother at all.

"What'll it be?" he asked, examining her with a frankness that she might have taken offence at twenty years ago. At her age, however, she was willing to concede that polite glances were for the younger and better sighted.

She marched across the stained and creaky expanse and slapped down atop the bar a yellowed catalogue card. Her lips pursed and chin tilted up, she regarded the man sternly, waiting for him to profess his innocence.

Aberforth Dumbledore peered down at the card and then reached into his pocket and withdrew a pair of spectacles. He put them on and looked the card over once more. Then he met Irma's challenging stare with incredulity.

" _Really?_ "

Irma crossed her arms. "Really."

His blue eyes narrowed. "Are you actually the librarian, or is this some sort of vigilante movement?"

She refused to dignify that with a response, and so she merely added a bill to the bar top. "This is how much it will cost to purchase a new copy."

Mr. Dumbledore raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms in turn. "And how about to purchase a hundred-year-old copy with jam stains, that being what I checked out."

Irma was prepared for that. She presented a second bill, priced out at Heckleby's Book Auction. It was significantly higher than the last. That was the cost of being old enough to have one's childhood constitute history.

Mr. Dumbledore glowered and looked her over even more rudely than before, as if taking measure of her pluck to tailor his unpleasantness accordingly.

She looked him over right back, in part to intimidate and in part to satisfy her own curiosity. He was a tall man, rather handsome in an altogether overgrown and roguish way, and met Irma's mental image of an incurable book-thief to the letter. She disliked him on the spot, which ought to have been her first clue.

"Well now," Mr. Dumbledore said slowly, when he had evidently decided she would not be cowed. "Suppose I return the book to you?"

"In that case," she said, "I would have to ascertain that it is still in circulatable condition. Do you still have it?"

"I'll have a look around," he said.

"Go right ahead." She did not budge.

The corner of his mouth quirked sharply. "It might take a while."

"I have time," she replied.

This seemed to tickle him. "Suit yourself," he said, and he came out from behind the bar and started towards the staircase, gesturing for her to follow.

Irma's left eyebrow leapt up when she saw his bekilted state, and she blamed her surprise for making her gaze linger overlong on his rather well-built legs as he led the way upstairs.

He proceeded down the upstairs corridor, all the way to the very end, where a narrow door stood. He opened the door, revealing a cupboard. Or rather, what would have been a cupboard if it were not a solid wall of what had to be thousands of books, stacked from floor to ceiling, at least twenty rows deep. Glimpses of sagging shelves peeked through, swollen-bellied galleons in a sea of paper.

Mr. Dumbledore had the good grace to give a small, embarrassed cough. "I've been meaning to sort them out for years."

Irma stared at the books, her gaze sliding over spines and titles, and her fingers very nearly twitching with the restrained urge to put them in order.

"I'll come back tomorrow," she said.

~*~

It was a late sunny morning when she returned to the Hog's Head. The breeze was soft and warm, and the air was full of sweetness and the drowsing of honeybees. Inside the inn, however, all was dim and cool once more, and that at least was merciful.

The rain had stopped some days before, after weeks of appropriately funereal stormclouds centred over the village—the result of too many hexes cast and too much miasma built up in the atmosphere—but now the last wisps had drifted away, already forgetful of what had passed.

Mr. Dumbledore looked down from the landing when she entered, and he descended the stairs to meet her. His sleeves were rolled up, and she could smell the scent of old paper about him as he neared.

"You're back," he said.

"As promised."

"As threatened."

Her lips curled quite independently, and fortunately, Mr. Dumbledore seemed not to see it as he brushed past her and stepped behind the bar. He began mixing a drink in a tall glass, and Irma supposed the purplish concoction was intended for the rather shaggy gentleman already drinking in the corner at ten o’clock in the morning. To her surprise, however, a little paper flower on a toothpick was deposited into the glass, which was then pushed towards her.

"I don't drink," was all she thought to say.

"It’s as temperate as springtime," Mr. Dumbledore replied.

Because he had not been so caddish as to use the v-word, she conceded to giving the contents of the glass a sniff. The drink smelled pleasantly of elderberry.

"I won't be bribed," she warned him.

At that, he smiled. "I'm sure you won't."

"I take it this means you haven't found the book."

Mr. Dumbledore glanced up to the landing, where she could see a spill of books that had crept down the corridor.

"It's a work in progress."

She took a sip of the drink and hummed softly in surprise. It was actually rather good.

"Let me finish this, and I'll help."

~*~

Halfway through her third visit, they hit a promising vein of classical literature. Irma perched on her chair (Mr. Dumbledore was, at least, gentlemanly enough to refuse to let her hunker on the floor with him) and sorted through a pile of Homer and Vergil, Herodotus and Josephus.

On another day, she might have pored over them, having had a particular love for the Greeks and Romans when she was a small girl with a tutor for a father. Today, however, she thought only of little children being thrown from towers, and old women rending their clothes, and the noisy, noisome business of war.

“'Having done what men could, they suffered what men must,'" Mr. Dumbledore mused, handling a volume of Thucydides.

She admired the way he held a book, his palms cupped carefully and his long fingers caressing the pages in a manner that left no creases. He had very nice hands.

"Don't be so gloomy," she said sharply, embarrassed when he caught her staring. "There's a peace on."

To her surprise, he laughed—a sound that had to shake off the rust for a syllable before warming to something golden and smooth.

"Inconvenient, that," he said. "But wars are like the Knight Bus. You never know exactly when it'll show up, but it always comes around eventually."

She sighed. "I've been assured this was the last one. I intend to hold someone to that."

They exchanged the world-weary glances of two people who remembered when 1981 was the last time, and 1945, and 1918.

Mr. Dumbledore tossed Thucydides into the weeding pile. "History is written by the victors. Someone clever said that once."

"History is written by the historians," she corrected. "I never did like histories. Too dry for so wet a subject."

"Same here."

"I prefer a nice romance," she said. "They've got it the other way around."

"Mysteries," Mr. Dumbledore said. Then he paused, and added gruffly, "Maybe the odd Georgette Heyer."

This time, she made no attempt to hide her smile.

~*~

"No, no," Irma said, plucking a book from Mr. Dumbledore’s hands. It was her fourth visit, and she had abandoned the chair in favour of mucking in properly. "If you're keeping the Aeschylus, it goes on that shelf."

He glowered at her from beneath his heavy eyebrows. "But you put the Shakespeare over here, woman!"

"Drama is a _medium_ , not a _genre_ ," she said with a sniff of disapproval.

He looked poised to argue but was interrupted by the sound of the door opening once again downstairs. Irma looked at her watch and realised that she'd been here four hours, and now the more seemly inebriates were beginning to trickle in.

"One moment," Mr. Dumbledore said, heaving himself to his feet with a crackle of cartilage and a muffled grunt. He looked down at her sternly. "Don't touch anything."

She seized an armful of plays the moment he was out of sight. The sound of quiet conversation and the clinking of glassware drifted up from below. He was gone for quite a while—long enough for her to sort all the tragedies from the comedies and the histories from the tragedies—and she was just beginning to wonder if he had succumbed to some unsavoury vice when footsteps returned to the stairs.

Mr. Dumbledore reappeared at the end of the corridor, balancing a large tray laden with sandwiches, pickles, some manner of pudding, a teapot, and two cups.

“I thought we could do with some victuals,” he said, his voice even gruffer than usual.

It was rather like picnicking, Irma had cause to reflect as they sat together in the corridor silently sharing their tea. Except, rather than trees, they were surrounded by tall stacks of cloth-bound hardcovers and pulpy little paperbacks. All in all, she decided, this was much more pleasant.

~*~

Was it her imagination that their industry slowed on the final day as they reached the last few piles of unsorted miscellanea? She watched as Mr. Dumbledore turned a handsome volume of folklore over in his hands, inspecting the ragged dust jacket critically.

"I haven't read this one since I was a boy," he said, then opened it to flip through its pages.

She herself took extraordinary care slotting a row of one-knut adventure novels onto the shelf. Then her gaze roamed over the remaining orphans, scanning their spines and finding no library binding.

"I'll be damned," Mr. Dumbledore said mildly. He tugged at his beard in evident annoyance. "I suppose I must have lost it after all."

Irma, despite her growing tolerance for him, could not keep back a chiding cluck of her tongue at the very idea.

"What was that again? Ten sickles?"

"Coin or cheque," she said graciously.

"Cheque," Mr. Dumbledore said, looking at her askance. "I don't trust you won't come shaking me down again without proof of pay. Let me find my chequebook."

Irma opened her mouth, hesitating for a moment as he made to haul himself up. Well, she thought briskly, surveying the neat (if still pleasantly crowded) shelves and recalling with some satisfaction the current state of the school card catalogue. Peacetime was well served by new pursuits. One had to keep busy between the wars.

"Wait." She waved her hand absently and feigned great interest in straightening a stray volume of seventeenth-century poetry. "Don't trouble yourself.”

He raised an eyebrow, looking altogether too knowing.

"Finish your tea,” she said archly. "I can come back tomorrow."


End file.
